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Thursday, January 24th, 2019

Greenland’s ice is melting four times faster than thought—what it means

Author:     STEPHEN LEAHY
Source:     National Geographic
Publication Date:     JANUARY 21, 2019
 Link: Greenland’s ice is melting four times faster than thought—what it means
Stephan:   Here is the latest on what is happening in Greenland, and a first approximation as to what it means. Remember, of course, that the timeline is always collapsing and the impact is always worse than expected. Increasingly, I am coming to believe that nothing meaningful is going to be done to address what is taking place and, therefore, America's coastal communities (as well as other areas in the world) are if not doomed, soon to be severely impaired. This will disrupt the lives of hundreds of millions, including millions of Americans, and produce a multi-trillion dollar real estate collapse in this country that may crash the economy. You just can't save stupidity from itself.

Greenland ice melting
Credit: Climate Signals

A new study warns that Greenland’s ice is melting faster than scientists previously thought. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that most of this ice loss is from the land-fast ice sheet itself, not Greenland’s glaciers.

The new study, published January 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the largest sustained ice loss from early 2003 to mid-2013 came from Greenland’s southwest region, which is mostly devoid of large glaciers.

Greenland, the world’s biggest island, appears to have hit a tipping point around 2002-2003 when the ice loss rapidly accelerated, said lead author Michael Bevis, a geoscientist at Ohio State University. By 2012 the annual ice loss was “unprecedented” at nearly four times the rate in 2003, Bevis said in an interview.

Much of this new accelerated ice melt came from southwest Greenland, a part of the island that hadn’t been known to be losing ice that rapidly. Previously, the scientific […]

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